The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  I was surprised at the age of the people. For a rock-star’s crowd, one expects dizzy teenage girls and the libidinous young street-toughs that pursue them. There were many of those, but more of another type: tired, footsore people with crow’s-feet and graying hair. Men and women in their thirties and forties, with a shabby, crushed look. Unemployed, obviously, and with time on their hands to cluster around anything that resembled hope.

  We walked without hurry to the fortress circle of busses. A rearguard of Boston’s kept the onlookers at bay. Two of the busses were already unlinked from the others and under full steam. I followed the black woman up perforated steps and into the bowels of one of the shining machines.

  She called brief greetings to the others already inside.

  The air held the sharp reek of cleaning fluid. Neat elastic cords strapped down stacks of amplifiers, stencilled instrument cases, wheeled dollies of black rubber and crisp yellow pine. The thirteen-starred circle marked everything, stamped or spray-painted. A methane-burning steam generator sat at the back of the bus, next to a tall crashproof rack of high-pressure fuel tanks. We skirted the equipment and joined the others in a narrow row of secondhand airplane seats. We buckled ourselves in. I sat next to the Doll-Haired Girl.

  The bus surged into motion. “It’s very clean,” I said to her. “I expected something a bit wilder on a rock and roll bus.”

  “Maybe in Egypt,” she said, with the instinctive decision that Egypt was in the Dark Ages. “We don’t have the luxury to screw around. Not now.”

  I decided not to tell her that Egypt, as a nation-state, no longer existed. “American pop culture is a very big industry.”

  “Biggest we have left,” she said. “And if you Muslims weren’t so pimpy about it, maybe we could pull down a few riyals and get out of debt.”

  “We buy a great deal from America,” I told her. “Grain and timber and minerals.”

  “That’s Third-World stuff. We’re not your farm.” She looked at the spotless floor. “Look, our industries suck, everyone knows it. So we sell entertainment. Except where there’s media barriers. And even then the fucking video pirates rip us off.”

  “We see things differently,” I said. “America ruled the global media for decades. To us, it’s cultural imperialism. We have many talented musicians in the Arab world. Have you ever heard them?”

  “Can’t afford it,” she said crisply. “We spent all our money saving the Persian Gulf from commies.”

  “The Global Threat of Red Totalitarianism,” said the heavyset man in the seat next to Doll-Hair. The others laughed grimly.

  “Oh,” I said. “Actually, it was Zionism that concerned us. When there was a Zionism.”

  “I can’t believe the hate shit I see about America,” said the heavy man. “You know how much money we gave away to people, just gave away, for nothing? Billions and billions. Peace Corps, development aid … for decades. Any disaster anywhere, and we fell all over ourselves to give food, medicine.… Then the Russians go down and the whole world turns against us like we were monsters.”

  “Moscow,” said another crewman, shaking his shaggy head.

  “You know, there are still motherfuckers who think we Americans killed Moscow. They think we gave a Bomb to those Afghani terrorists.”

  “It had to come from somewhere,” I said.

  “No, man. We wouldn’t do that to them. No, man, things were going great between us. Rock for Detente—I was at that gig.”

  We drove to Miami’s Memorial Colosseum. It was an ambitious structure, left half-completed when the American banking system collapsed.

  We entered double-doors at the back, wheeling the equipment along dusty corridors. The Colosseum’s interior was skeletal; inside it was clammy and cavernous. A stage, a concrete floor. Bare steel arched high overhead, with crudely bracket-mounted stage-lights. Large sections of that bizarre American parody of grass, “Astroturf,” had been dragged before the stage. The itchy green fur, still lined with yard-marks from some forgotten stadium, was almost indestructible. At second-hand rates, it was much cheaper than carpeting.

  The crew worked with smooth precision, setting up amplifiers, spindly mike-stands, a huge high-tech drum kit with the clustered, shiny look of an oil refinery. Others checked lighting, flicking blue and yellow spots across the stage. At the public entrances, two crewmen from a second bus erected metal detectors for illicit cameras, recorders, or handguns. Especially handguns. Two attempts had already been made on Boston’s life, one at the Chicago Freedom Festival, when Chicago’s Mayor was wounded at Boston’s side.

  For a moment, to understand it, I mounted the empty stage and stood before Boston’s microphone. I imagined the crowd before me, ten thousand souls, twenty thousand eyes. Under that attention, I realized, every motion was amplified. To move my arm would be like moving ten thousand arms, my every word like the voice of thousands. I felt like a Nasser, a Qadaffi, a Saddam Hussein.

  This was the nature of secular power. Industrial power. It was the West that invented it, that invented Hitler, the gutter orator turned trampler of nations, that invented Stalin, the man they called “Genghis Khan with a telephone.” The media pop star, the politician. Was there any difference any more? Not in America; it was all a question of seizing eyes, of seizing attention. Attention is wealth, in an age of mass media. Center stage is more important than armies.

  The last unearthly moans and squeals of sound-check faded. The Miami crowd began to filter into the Colosseum. They looked livelier than the desperate searchers that had pursued Boston to his hotel. America was still a wealthy country, by most standards; the professional classes had kept much of their prosperity. There were those legions of lawyers, for instance, that secular priesthood that had done so much to drain America’s once-vaunted enterprise. And their associated legions of state bureaucrats. They were instantly recognizable; the cut of their suits, the telltale pocket telephones proclaiming their status.

  What were they looking for here? Had they never read Boston’s propaganda paper, with its bitter condemnation of everything they stood for? With its fierce attacks on the “legislative-litigative complex,” its demands for sweeping reforms?

  Was it possible that they failed to take him seriously?

  I joined the crowd, mingling, listening to conversations. At the doors, Boston cadres were cutting ticket prices for those who showed voter registrations. Those who showed unemployment cards got in for even less.

  The prosperous Americans stood in little knots of besieged gentility, frightened of the others, yet curious, smiling. There was a liveliness in the destitute: brighter clothing, knotted kerchiefs at the elbows, cheap Korean boots of irridescent cloth. Many wore tricornered hats, some with a cockade of red, white, and blue, or the circle of thirteen stars.

  This was rock and roll, I realized; that was the secret. They had all grown up on it, these Americans, even the richer ones. To them, the sixty-year tradition of rock music seemed as ancient as the Pyramids. It had become a Jerusalem, a Mecca of American tribes.

  The crowd milled, waiting, and Boston let them wait. At the back of the crowd, Boston crewmen did a brisk business in starred souvenir shirts, programs, and tapes. Heat and tension mounted, and people began to sweat. The stage remained dark.

  I bought the souvenir items and studied them. They talked about cheap computers, a phone company owned by its workers, a free database, neighborhood co-ops that could buy unmilled grain by the ton. ATTENTION MIAMI, read one brochure in letters of dripping red. It named the ten largest global corporations and meticulously listed every subsidiary doing business in Miami, with its address, its phone number, the percentage of income shipped to banks in Europe and Japan. Each list went on for pages. Nothing else. To Boston’s audience, nothing else was necessary.

  The house lights darkened. A frightening animal roar rose from the crowd. A single spot lit Tom Boston, stencilling him against darkness.

  “My fellow Americans,” he said. A funereal h
ush followed. The crowd strained for each word. Boston smirked. “My f-f-f-f-fellow Americans.” It was a clever microphone, digitized, a small synthesizer in itself. “My fellow Am-am-am-am-AMM!” The words vanished in a sudden soaring wail of feedback. “My Am/ my fellows/ My Am/ my fellows/ Miami, Miami, Miami, MIAMI!” The sound of Boston’s voice, suddenly leaping out of all human context, becoming something shattering, superhuman—the effect was bone-chilling. It passed all barriers, it seeped directly into the skin, the blood.

  “Tom Jefferson Died Broke!” he shouted. It was the title of his first song. Stage lights flashed up and hell broke its gates. Was it a “song” at all, this strange, volcanic creation? There was a melody loose in it somewhere, pursued by Plisetskaya’s saxophone, but the sheer volume and impact hurled it through the audience like a sheet of flame. I had never before heard anything so loud. What Cairo’s renegade set called rock and roll paled to nothing beside this invisible hurricane.

  At first it seemed raw noise. But that was only a kind of flooring, a merciless grinding foundation below the rising architectures of sound. Technology did it: a piercing, soaring, digitized, utter clarity, of perfect cybernetic acoustics adjusting for each echo, a hundred times a second.

  Boston played a glass harmonica: an instrument invented by the early American genius Benjamin Franklin. The harmonica was made of carefully tuned glass disks, rotating on a spindle, and played by streaking a wet fingertip across each moving edge.

  It was the sound of pure crystal, seemingly sourceless, of tooth-aching purity.

  The famous Western musician, Wolfgang Mozart, had composed for the Franklin harmonica in the days of its novelty. But legend said that its players went mad, their nerves shredded by its clarity of sound. It was a legend Boston was careful to exploit. He played the machine sparingly, with the air of a magician, of a Solomon unbottling demons. I was glad of his spare use, for its sound was so beautiful that it stung the brain.

  Boston threw aside his hat. Long coiled hair spilled free. Boston was what Americans called “black”; at least he was often referred to as black, though no one seemed certain. He was no darker than myself. The beat rose up, a strong animal heaving. Boston stalked across the stage as if on springs, clutching his microphone. He began to sing.

  The song concerned Thomas Jefferson, a famous American president of the 18th century. Jefferson was a political theorist who wrote revolutionary manifestos and favored a decentralist mode of government. The song, however, dealt with the relations of Jefferson and a black concubine in his household. He had several children by this woman, who were a source of great shame, due to the odd legal code of the period. Legally, they were his slaves, and it was only at the end of his life, when he was in great poverty, that Jefferson set them free.

  It was a story whose pathos makes little sense to a Muslim. But Boston’s audience, knowing themselves Jefferson’s children, took it to heart.

  The heat became stifling, as massed bodies swayed in rhythm. The next song began in a torrent of punishing noise. Frantic hysteria seized the crowd; their bodies spasmed with each beat, the shaman Boston seeming to scourge them. It was a fearsome song, called “The Whites of Their Eyes,” after an American war-cry. He sang of a tactic of battle: to wait until the enemy comes close enough so that you can meet his eyes, frighten him with your conviction, and then shoot him point blank. The chorus harked again and again to the “Cowards of the long kill,” a Boston slogan condemning those whose abstract power structures let them murder without ever seeing pain.

  Three more songs followed, one of them slower, the others battering the audience like iron rods. Boston stalked like a madman, his clothing dark with sweat. My heart spasmed as heavy bass notes, filled with dark murderous power, surged through my ribs. I moved away from the heat to the fringe of the crowd, feeling light-headed and sick.

  I had not expected this. I had expected a political spokesman, but instead it seemed I was assaulted by the very Voice of the West. The Voice of a society drunk with raw power, maddened by the grinding roar of machines. It filled me with terrified awe.

  To think that once, the West had held us in its armored hands. It had treated Islam like a natural resource, its invincible armies plowing through the lands of the Faithful like bulldozers. The West had chopped our world up into colonies, and smiled upon us with its awful schizophrenic perfidy. It told us to separate God and State, to separate Mind and Body, to separate Reason and Faith. It had torn us apart.

  I stood shaking as the first set ended. The band vanished backstage, and a single figure approached the microphone. I recognized him as a famous American television comedian, who had abandoned his own career to jon Boston.

  The man began to joke and clown, his antics seeming to soothe the crowd, which hooted with laughter. This intermission was a wise move on Boston’s part, I thought. The level of pain, of intensity, had become unbearable.

  It struck me then how much Boston was like the great Khomeini. Boston too had the persona of the Man of Sorrows, the sufferer after justice, the ascetic among corruption, the battler against odds. And the air of the mystic, the adept, at least as far as such a thing was possible in America. I thought of this, and deep fear struck me once again.

  I walked through the gates to the Colosseum’s outer hall, seeking air and room to think. Others had come out too. They leaned against the wall, men and women, with the look of wrung-out mops. Some smoked cigarettes, others argued over brochures, others simply sat with palsied grins.

  Still others wept. These disturbed me most, for these were the ones whose souls seemed stung and opened. Khomeini made men weep like that, tearing aside despair like a bandage from a burn. I walked down the hall, watching them, making mental notes.

  I stopped by a woman in dark glasses and a trim business suit. She leaned against the wall, shaking, her face beneath the glasses slick with silent tears. Something about the precision of her styled hair, her cheekbones, struck a memory. I stood beside her, waiting, and recognition came.

  “Hello,” I said. “We have something in common, I think. You’ve been covering the Boston tour. For CBS.”

  She glanced at me once, and away. “I don’t know you.”

  “You’re Marjory Cale, the correspondent.”

  She drew in a breath. “You’re mistaken.”

  “‘Luddite fanatic’,” I said lightly. “‘Rock demagogue’.”

  “Go away,” she said.

  “Why not talk about it? I’d like to know your point of view.”

  “Go away, you nasty little man.”

  I returned to the crowd inside. The comedian was now reading at length from the American Bill of Rights, his voice thick with sarcasm. “Freedom of advertising,” he said. “Freedom of global network television conglomerates. Right to a speedy and public trial, to be repeated until our lawyers win. A well-regulated militia being necessary, citizens will be issued orbital lasers and aircraft carriers.…” No one was laughing.

  The crowd was in an ugly mood when Boston reappeared. Even the well-dressed ones now seemed surly and militant, not recognizing themselves as the enemy. Like the Shah’s soldiers who at last refused to fire, who threw themselves sobbing at Khomeini’s feet.

  “You all know this one,” Boston said. With his wife, he raised a banner, one of the first flags of the American Revolution. It bore a coiled snake, a native American viper, with the legend: DON’T TREAD ON ME. A sinister, scaly rattling poured from the depths of a synthesizer, merging with the crowd’s roar of recognition, and a sprung, loping rhythm broke loose. Boston edged back and forth at the stage’s rim, his eyes fixed, his long neck swaying. He shook himself like a man saved from drowning and leaned into the microphone.

  “We know you own us/ You step upon us/ We feel the onus/ But here’s a bonus/ Today I see/ So enemy/ Don’t tread on me/ Don’t tread on me.…” Simple words, fitting each beat with all the harsh precision of the English language. A chant of raw hostility. The crowd took it up. This was the ha
tred, the humiliation of a society brought low. Americans. Somewhere within them conviction still burned. The conviction they had always had: that they were the only real people on our planet. The chosen ones, the Light of the World, the Last Best Hope of Mankind, the Free and the Brave, the crown of creation. They would have killed for him. I knew, someday, they would.

  * * *

  I was called to Boston’s suite at two o’clock that morning. I had shaved and showered, dashed on the hotel’s complimentary cologne. I wanted to smell like an American.

  Boston’s guards frisked me, carefully and thoroughly, outside the elevator. I submitted with good grace.

  Boston’s suite was crowded. It had the air of an election victory. There were many politicians, sipping glasses of bubbling alcohol, laughing, shaking hands. Miami’s Mayor was there, with half his City Council. I recognized a young woman Senator, speaking urgently into her pocket phone, her large freckled breasts on display in an evening gown.

  I mingled, listening. Men spoke of Boston’s ability to raise funds, of the growing importance of his endorsement. More of Boston’s guards stood in corners, arms folded, eyes hidden, their faces stony. A black man distributed lapel buttons with the face of Martin Luther King on a background of red and white stripes. The wall-sized television played a tape of the first Moon Landing. The sound had been turned off, and people all over the world, in the garb of the 1960’s, mouthed silently at the camera, their eyes shining.

  It was not until four o’clock that I finally met the star himself. The party had broken up by then, the politicians politely ushered out, their vows of undying loyalty met with discreet smiles. Boston was in a back bedroom with his wife, and a pair of aides.

  “Seyyid,” he said, and shook my hand. In person he seemed smaller, older, his hybrid face, with stage makeup, beginning to peel.

  “Dr. Boston,” I said.

  He laughed freely. “Sayyid, my friend. You’ll ruin my street fucking credibility.”